This hefty, immaculate volume inaugurates the innovative series of Blackwell Companions to Anthropology, and does so with academic panache.
These companions offer comprehensive synthesis of the traditional sub‐disciplines, primary subjects, and geographic areas of inquiry in the broad field of anthropology. Taken together, they are a contemporary survey of anthropology and also a guide to emerging research and intellectual trends in that field. Further volumes will cover political anthropology, psychological anthropology, the anthropology of Japan, and the anthropology of American Indians. Linguistic anthropology focuses on the interface between linguistic forms and the cultural practices that they help constitute. The 22 essays of this Companion are in‐depth explorations of key concepts and approaches in contemporary study of language as culture, opening up new perspectives and formulating new conceptualisations. State‐of‐the‐art reports, in fact, with an introduction to each area of study, detailed discussion of its most innovative and challenging dimensions, and a set of illustrative examples.
As is inevitable with works of high scholarship, some of the terminology used is daunting. The authors recognise this and take considerable care in defining key concepts, to make the topical essays intelligible for readers with no previous knowledge of the field. In this they have largely succeeded. Demanding, but not obscure!
Part I: Speech Communities, Contact and Variation (pp. 1‐165) has seven studies, each with its own bibliography (in all the studies throughout the book). This part sets a frame for the work as a whole, as the concept of speech community is fundamental in linguistic anthropology. The topics expertly analysed include speech community, registers of language, language contact, and codeswitching. Pacific Islands, North American Indians, and sign languages are illuminated by eminent authorities. The next part, The Performing of Language (pp. 167‐345), also with seven studies, ranges over conversation, gesture, participation, literacy practices, narrative, poetry, and vocal anthropology. The last of these vividly shows how language and music intertwine with the help of three ethnographic case studies. Two of these will be of interest to aficionados of Texas and Apache country music. The five studies of Part III, Achieving Subjectivities and Intersubjectivities Through Language (pp. 347‐448), are of wide general interest and especially stimulating of thought. They consider language socialization, language and identity, misunderstanding, language and madness, language and religion. More thought to the language components of madness and of religion is urged. The three studies of the concluding part, The Power in Language (pp. 449‐517), address, respectively, agency in language (by the editor of the Companion, Alessandro Duranti, Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles), language and social inequality, language ideologies.
All the contributions in this wide‐ranging and immensely thoughtful and thought‐provoking symposium are of superb quality and academic authority. They reveal the intricacy and the fascination of a rapidly developing area of research. The 22 constituent studies are helpfully abstracted in Synopsis of Contents (pp. vii‐xii). Notes on Contributors (pp. xvi‐xx) reveals the awesome scholarly stature of the 31 authors, all but four of them from academic institutions in the USA. There are no contributors from Great Britain. The index (pp. 606‐625) has a skeletal look, and is predominantly of names, yet it appears to work adequately well.
The Companion glories in a General Bibliography (pp. 518‐605), comprehensively listing well over 2,000 works in the literature of linguistic anthropology. This is, in itself, a major reference resource, to be welcomed wholeheartedly by academic libraries, researchers, and students alike. Coupling the 22 individual chapter bibliographies with this General Bibliography, the Companion (though not strictly a work of reference) qualifies as a resource of genuine utility in academic libraries with any interest in linguistics or anthropology. An impressive contribution to knowledge.
